Let them strike until the Messiah comes

Striking social workers spare the nation unnatural social engineering agendas and much human misery. Opinion

Mordechai Sones, 06/12/18 20:27

'Let them strike until the Messiah comes': Social workers

Flash 90

Social workers in the Education Ministry, National Insurance Institute, health system, hospitals, health funds, and mental health centers in the north of Israel joined in a strike to pressure the Finance Ministry to accede to their demands. The strike precludes receiving the public and writing court reports, cancels all decision committees on minors at risk, and closes centers for treating domestic violence.

For years it has been known what Psychology Today reported in the article Why Do Patients Stop Dying When Doctors Go on Strike? "When doctors strike, the scientific research shows that patients stop dying. The most comprehensive review of the medical impact of doctors' strikes is published in the prestigious academic journal Social Science and Medicine. A team lead by Solveig Cunningham and Salim Yusuf at Emory and Georgetown Universities in the U.S. and McMaster University in Canada, analysed five physician strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003.

"Doctors withdrew their labour, in the different strikes analysed, from between nine days and 17 weeks. Yet all the different studies report population mortality either stays the same, or even decreases, during medical strikes. Not a single study found death rates increased during the weeks of the strikes, compared to other times."

If something as (seemingly) counter-intuitive as less people dying when doctors strike is a proven fact, could it also be that less families disintegrate when social workers strike?

The Prime Minister this week said that "violence against women is terrorism", and "abusive men need a punch in the face". An alien visiting from another planet, or a new child growing up in this world, would conclude there are two classes on Earth: The Baddies and the Goodies. The Baddies are prone to violence and need to be reeducated, and the Goodies aren't and don't.

Does violence against men even exist in Netanyahu's world, and do abusive women need a "punch in the face"? Such rhetoric represents a dangerous permission granted to those who would sanction violence against men as a form of societal reeducation.

But let's say the "punch" remark was uttered in jest. Would it have been difficult for the Prime Minister to say "violence is terrorism, and abusers need a punch", not distinguishing between genders?

Apparently such a statement would not have been sufficient to deflect feminist pressure: Last week MK Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid) attacked the Prime Minister, writing he "flees responsibility".

"By the time he finally addressed the murder of women in Israel - after his long silence - all he had to suggest at today's cabinet meeting to set up another committee to combat domestic violence," Lavie wrote. When one of the ministers reminded him that there was already such a committee, the Prime Minister replied: "Then we'll establish another one."

Prof. Zeev Weinstock of the University of Haifa, one of the world's leading experts on violence between spouses, said at the first meeting of the Distributive Justice and Social Equality Committee: "For almost 50 years we've known that men's violence towards women takes place in similar proportions to the violence that women use against men in intimate relationships, in almost every culture and society that we know," he said, "from traditional societies to liberal Western societies.

"In addition, we know that in the motivations for violence, there is no difference between men and women. For the same reasons that men beat women, women beat men. The results are different, because of the differences between men and women, and men's physical endurance - they are injured less and therefore arrive less to the emergency rooms. So the visibility of the problem is very high in the case of women, but the motivations and the violent behavior are not a peculiarity of either particular gender."

Something that is a peculiarity of one particular gender is estrangement from fathers after divorce, a tragedy that happens too often but is publicly discussed too seldom. It happens to mothers too, but is almost always a problem affecting fathers and their children.

Part of the problem is the family law system, run by lawyers who profit from every new divorce case and judges, religious and secular, who do not judge according to a child's best interest but rather according to the dictates of a social engineer's feminist vision. They want to build an unmale society that, according to their lights, is supposed to mold a people less warlike and aggressive, but actually causes miscarriages of justice, pain, and misery, again and again and again.

The family law system is biased against fathers. This is not to say that fathers do not play their part in the family's breakup. It only means that whether a father is a horrible monster or the best father in the world, the family court and social workers are stacked against him. Every day good fathers are forced out of their homes and out of the lives of their children because the system provides the incentive for it to be that way.

At the same time, mothers, bad or good, are favored by the family law system.

The social workers are the shock troops who implement this vision. It is a system that encourages and profits from family conflict. Their system breeds cases like the one in the Mako News headline: 15-year-old boy jumps from building at end of meeting with welfare services.

Would that all social workers in Israel were up to the standard of the excellent and imminently competent Tammy Yismach from Binyamin, for example. But alas, after more than ten years of grappling with the cold and Kafkaesque labyrinth of Israel's Social Services system, this writer has worked with more social workers than the average person and finds the Yismachs outnumbered fifteen-to-one. The usual experience is dealing with a vapid, shallow, and remorseless bureaucrat who has learned to hate those they are supposed to serve by being forced to impose an unjust and unnatural social engineer's vision on already broken families.

I have seen too many social workers who have no compunctions about destroying children's lives, and too many willing to lie in court. Someone should check to determine whether less families disintegrate when social workers strike. I say let them strike until the Messiah comes.